About a year ago I installed CA antivirus software on my computer thinking, you know what, I should probably have some form of antivirus software installed for my own protection. It was a 1 year trial version. A year later, I completely regretted this when the software expired. On startup, CA antivirus popped up a message telling me it had expired and gave me the two options everyone loves to see – “renew” or “ask me later”. It opened up an IE window every hour or so with the same message, as well as a system tray message that wouldn’t disappear on its own. Annoying much?

So I tried to remove it the usual way – Control panel > Add/Remove programs. Nope, it said it’s still running so it can’t be removed. Hm. So I tried to shut down all likely looking processes and tried again. Nope, still running. Tried a few less likely looking processes, no luck again. Went into the registry and removed it from the startup programs list and restarted the machine. Nope, somehow it found a way around that and I was greeted with my two friendly options again on startup.

But this week, I finally managed to kill it. Here’s how:

1. Downloaded and installed CCCleaner: http://www.cccleaner.com
2. Ran the “Find Issues” option. Deleted a heap of unused stuff.
3. Restarted Windows in safe mode.
4. Went to control panel > add/remove programs and finally managed to remove that sucker.
5. Ran CCCleaner again while still in safe mode, just to be sure.
6. Gone!

I don’t know what’s worse really – having an actual virus or just having antivirus software. I feel so free now.